Strange Behaviour of SuSEfirewall

Hi! I've just stumbled across a rather strange thing. When starting up SuSEfirewall (version 1 or two), the script most of the time complains that "eth0 is not active". When I had a look at the script, I saw that it tries to find the ip address by calling ifconfig and digesting the output via sed and awk. The problem: awk searches for "inet addr:", but ifconfig returns "inet Adresse:". It seems that SuSEfirewall relies on a english version of ifconfig. Is there any easy workaround besides patching the script? I'm not quite sure if my knowledge of shell scripts would suffice to patch the thing by myself... ;-) Best regards Albert Brandl